According to a consumer survey of 44,168 people, iPhone is the best smartphone. While that result's likely to be a controversial among Android users, it's probably not surprising to iPhone fans.

Except that the survey was in Korea, the homeland of bitter Apple rival Samsung.

iPhones have few failures, Korean respondents said, with only 17% having any issue with their Apple smartphone, while 31% reported issues with Android-based Samsung phones.

Samsung has about 65% of the smartphone market in south Korea; Apple, less than 10%. While that's a big survey (though you'd need to know its methodology to know whether it's completely reliable), there's no data about reliability by model.

First, the idea is based on this. The project is set up like this:1. implant magnets; 2. test implants with coil to make sure audio is picked up; 3. implant coil/other parts w/transdermal jack & power charger.

Having stuff like this done isn't really the realm of doctors. Most Grinders rely on body modification artists to install their implants. I've had work done by the body modification master Steve Haworth in the past and have relied on him for advice on several project ideas. Steve instinctively knew the best way to go about the implantation in a way that would minimize chances for infection and would leave no scarring. The implant procedure itself went very smoothly and the pain was surprisingly minimal.

The first thing everyone asks is "why would you do this?" Honestly, I don't feel the need to answer this question. People either get it or they don't. I'm a Grinder, and we are notorious for getting it.

Yes, he really had magnets implanted in his head so that he would have invisible headphones. Apart from the coil around his neck, obviously. (But as he points out, that can go under a shirt.)

I put this question to my new first year students yesterday during a series of seminars designed to get them thinking (and re-thinking) about their preconceptions of their subject. Pizza flyers, it was agreed, are about as good examples of bad design as you could hope for.

But had any of them used one to order pizza? Almost all had, and several said they kept flyers and even had them taped on the fridge door. So are they badly designed? I asked again. It was like the scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail where the peasants are trying to work out the tortured logic of what it means if a witch burns: b-because… they're made… of wood?'

Design is what it does, not what it looks like. And what pizza flyers do is sell the desire for pizza. (Thanks @JonathanBaldwin for the link.)

"Samsung has acquired key talent and assets from Boxee. This will help us continue to improve the overall user experience across our connected devices," a Samsung spokesperson said in a statement to Multichannel News. In addition to connected TVs, possible ports of entry for Boxee's UI on the Samsung product lineup include Blu-ray players and a new retail CableCARD device in the works that will combine live TV with over-the-top video.

Samsung declined to provide financial terms of the deal, but published reports Wednesday put it at "tens of millions of dollars," but less than the $28.5m Boxee has raised since it was founded in 2007.

Boxee is reckoned to have 2m devices in the field (including PC-connected ones). But this could be a way for Samsung to get into the US set-top box market.

There are other languages for GPU programming, including CUDA and OpenCL. In fact, [the new programming language] Harlan actually compiles to OpenCL. But unlike these other languages, Harlan provides programming abstractions more associated with higher-level programming languages, such as Python and Ruby.

"Another goal of the Harlan was to answer the question 'What would we do if we started from scratch on a language and designed it from the beginning to support GPU programming?'" he says. "Most of the systems so far embed GPU programming in an existing language, which means you have to handle all the quirks of the host language. Harlan lets us make the best decisions for our target hardware and applications."

Harlan's syntax is based on Scheme, a dialect of the influential programming language Lisp, which was created by artificial intelligence researcher John McCarthy in 1958. "It's the ancestor for every good language," Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto, creator of the Ruby programming language, once told SiliconAngle.

There's something weird about the headline - "Man invents.." - but the concept is fascinating. (Thanks @ClarkeViper for the link.)

After the Russian head of HTC confirmed on Twitter that - due to technical issues - there are no further plans to release Android 4.2/Jelly Bean for the HTC One S, yesterday morning HTC France confirmed the same on its very own Facebook page. A user asked when he could expect Android 4.2.2 for his One S and HTC replied that (according to Google Translate) "the HTC One S no longer have access to updates for future versions of Android and HTC Sense". HTC is even aware that this is frustrating news for most of us and continued to explain that "our customers can be confident that we have designed for the One S that offers video and audio experience of the highest quality".

After watching Google disarm and then kill the product he launched nearly eight years ago, Google Reader founder Chris Wetherell said that if the idea came to him in today's Google, he would leave the company and build it on his own rather than put it at the mercy of Google leadership.

"I would absolutely not do it inside of Google," he said. "I would hate that to be my idea versus Google Plus. That would be very frustrating."

Wetherell's comments highlight a problem Google might face now that Reader is shutting down. The company has long benefited from a culture of innovation which has helped it turn employee side projects like Gmail, Google News and Ad Sense into core offerings. But, with the understanding that even successful products can be killed in the future, the company's employees might now have less of an incentive to launch their ideas within Google, and innovation at the company may suffer as a result.

Jenna Bilotta, the UX designer for Reader (and Wetherell's partner), says that user numbers were increasing until they left. Of course, what makes Google different is that it tends to kill its projects in public - after they have lots of users. Other companies kill them before they launch.

Craig, are you aware of this? More importantly, are Craigslist users aware of this limitation imposed on their rights? This type of provision raises questions of IP law, Constitutional law, public policy and potential adverse consequences to Internet law. Further it explores the attempt by large corporations to own you and what you own.

Kurt Opsahl of the Electronic Frontier Foundation writes, "Craigslist has veered from the path to a free and open Internet into a dark passage of walls, locks, and criminal prosecutions. We should not have a future in which (website) terms of use can be used to put people in jail, nor a future in which websites own the content posted by the users. We don't want a future where Craigslist can sue you for distributing your own band flyer by hand, just because you posted it on Craigslist."